


ash filled lungs, stone filled oceans

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: And Kara is the Last One Standing, F/F, Gen, The End of the World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 08:59:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15905088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: She holds a broken body in her arms. Hellfire rains down around her.





	ash filled lungs, stone filled oceans

She holds a broken body in her arms. Hellfire rains down around her. 

This stranger should mean nothing to her. Kara doesn’t even know her name. Only knows the familiar raven hair and a ghost of her jawline in Kara’s not so distant memories. Everything else had been extraneous as she’d tried to catch the stranger as she fell through open glass of a fifth floor building. 

Again, she hadn’t made it in time. 

Again, the body had hit ground unmoving.

Sometimes, Kara could still hear the bones crack. The shatter of her spine playing like a symphony while she flew patrols around National City. Blood pooling out of her skull spilt over silk sheets against her skin, when she stared up through the darkness and didn’t sleep.

 _Kara_ , she hears her name but there’s no one left to have said it. 

_Kara run!_

Then there’s a cracking, crashing, and her lungs fill up with a new wave of dust. 

The sky is falling down. Like an impossible nursery rhyme. Great white chunks of moon are burning through the greyed out atmosphere. Red bullets raining down on earth. 

It doesn’t kill her. There is so much that doesn’t kill her. 

Another shard crashes through the sky. The pieces are getting larger, chunks with more mass burning slower through the atmosphere. They will fall harder once gravity catches them though. 

_This is their extinction_ , she thinks to herself. But not her own. That fell decades ago.

 

Alex had gone first, but she’d always expected that. There’d been a flash, a white light and a new kind of weapon. Then her sister, disintegrating beneath her palms.

She hadn’t been able to save her. 

In the end there’d been nothing left to save.

 

She sets the body down gently. A modicum of peace for a departed soul. There will be no funerals, no ritual. No path laid out to show them after-life. 

Dust falls over the body like snowflakes, claiming it back into the earth. Her eyes, at least, are already closed. 

Lena’s hadn’t been. Lena had been expecting Kara to catch her. 

And she’d missed.

 

It’d been any other Monday when it started. The sun had risen and Lena muttering voice notes to herself in the bathroom had woken her. 

She’d made coffee.

They’d left for work. 

She hadn’t known that when she stopped by L-Corp for lunch, it would be the second last time she’d see Lena on that balcony.

She hadn’t known that days later the world would still be cracking apart. 

 

The sun is gone. The clouded dust is so thick it’s midnight in the middle of the day. Like the sun has been punched out of the sky, or Earth has been shot off its axis, flung from its orbital path into the oblivion of space. 

The ground already feels heavier. It won’t be long until she’s tied to it completely.

She’s not sure she minds. The heavens no longer boast freedom. The canvas sky has been painted black. A working masterpiece drenched in oil, with no room left for a new beginning. 

It’s only fair this earth should claim her. 

 

“Supergirl!” A shrill voice cries, panicked, and Kara almost topples into the speaker. 

A little girl kneels in the dirt. She’s eight or nine and drenched in ash. It coats her skin, her clothes, even her eyelashes. Her lips are crackled and grey. Her hair has aged in a way she will never live to see. 

Tear tracks carve like rivers down her cheeks, between mountains of dust, and reveal brown human skin beneath. 

At her knees is the corpse of a woman, already being swallowed whole by the falling ash. The girl clutches one of her hands, trying to drag her to the surface without realizing they’re both sinking at sea. 

“Supergirl, _help_.” She cries. Whines. Kara stares.

How odd it must be to watch their god die. She should have insisted more firmly they store their faith elsewhere. Now, there’s nothing she can do. No miracles at her disposal, only the slow seep of mortality.

Kara waits with the girl until her lungs run out. Until the clouds get too thick and her shallow gasps turn to coughs. Until she finally slumps over her mother’s body, still.

They don’t talk, the wind is whipping too hard for that, but the little girl holds her hand so tightly that even in death Kara has to pry the grip free. 

There’s a red mark left on the thin skin between her thumb and forefinger. It doesn’t fade. 

 

It’s raining. Water falls down mixed with debris and droplets of both hit her skin hard. She lets them beat on her body. Rain and stone drench her to the bone. 

She can feel the bruises forming and she’s not sure which are from which. 

It runs in rivers past her feet and she wonders how she hasn’t drowned yet. Surely there’s been a tsunami. Surely one of the pieces crashed in the ocean and left the water on land. 

The flood should be rising. Except there’s no animals to march two by two, no saviour arc to lead them to. And this was not the work of an almighty force, just a human, with too much hubris. 

There’s only one god here and she’s bleeding. 

Through a gash through her suit, just above the symbol, that goes all the way down to her chest. The skin’s split open, underneath her collarbones, and the rain washes dirt into it. Mixing in with her blood, the ash turns black and crusts over the wound. If she were going to live any longer she’d worry about it turning septic. 

But she’s only waiting. There’s no more tide to sweep her away so it’ll have to be done the old fashioned way. She’ll have to wait for the rains to carry her out to sea. 

 

Lena had a solution days ago. She always had a solution. Never one that Kara particularly liked, but a solution nonetheless. 

A device, that would remotely trigger the weapon. So it would implode, before it ever had the chance to be tested. Their villain alongside it. 

Kara hadn’t agreed.

She knows she made a mistake. 

The tower had come crashing down and her morality had lost.

**Author's Note:**

> This is based around a conversation that I had like a year ago with a friend about how Kara's inability to let anyone die was going to have some serious consequences one day. I've never written for Supergirl before so I hope this didn't suck. Let me know what you think and if you want to find me on tumblr I'm @sinkingsidewalks


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